Metacritic Journal

for Comparative Studies and Theory

The third issue of Metacritic Journal of Comparative Studies and Theory hosts a non-themed collection of articles, gathering the best award-winning papers from the Students’ Conference organised by the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, accompanied by a selection of papers by senior researchers, made by our reviewers from among the proposals received after the Call for Papers went public.

The critical dispute in the interpretive history of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is traditionally polarised between whether Katherina is - at the end of the play - tamed or not. This article examines part of this interpretive history as a barometer of cultural coding of domestic love. Instead of deciding yet again if Katherina is sincere, or just acting obedient, I want to see how different cultural contexts choose their reading of a canonic play in popular culture. The article shows how and where the... ⇨ Read more

This paper aims to present a brief diachronic and transmedial overview of the development of the features of narration and its atomic unit, the narreme. Across media, narratives change, and so do the techniques and processes involved, giving rise to several distinctions in terms of genre, narreme delivery, audience involvement and relationship between audience and author. This is achieved through an attempt at identifying certain common features of narratives across media and to properly define and isolate the... ⇨ Read more

This paper takes a new “trans” approach to the issues of reading literary fiction; it goes beyond a transdisciplinary approach, into a trans-functional one, investigating the way literature surpasses its initial function and works therapeutically, in the form of bibliotherapy, compensating for certain human psychological frailties and providing psychological explanations for the mechanisms involved. In this sense, reading can be understood as a form of trans-reading. Psychological studies demonstrate that the... ⇨ Read more

The main issue of the novel The Bonfire (Original title: Máglya) by the Hungarian writer György Dragomán is the confrontation of the child narrator (a 13-year old girl) with the traumas of the twentieth century which marked her parents’ and grandparents’ life and are still influencing her life in the post-communist era. The first premise of the central argument is that the child’s special point of view determines the perception of history and forgiveness. The second premise is that this point of view can be... ⇨ Read more

The current paper aims to illustrate how Michel Houellebecq's prose revolves around the failure of otherness. His character, always male, is in search of indemnifying options to rebuild the connections that have been suddenly interrupted, such as miscarriages or losing partners due to suicide. At first sight, the woman's figure naturally meets these requirements. Otherness is being reduced to a barren body, that acts as an extension of the traditional female role: woman as an erotic partner and maternal figure.... ⇨ Read more

The present paper, drawing mainly on the findings of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Richard Kearney, aims to explore the complex framing as subalterns undergone by Spike, the obscenely beautiful Robo sapiens of Jeanette Winterson‘s The Stone Gods, as well as Sonmi-451, one of the ascended fabricants or cognitively awakened clones in the service industry of David Mitchell‘s Cloud Atlas. There is an inherent paradox here: if these posthumans are both posterior and superior, what makes it possible to... ⇨ Read more

Both Indian and Western aesthetic thinking is impregnated with significant views about the language of literature. However, the Indian theory of vakrokti (obliquity) and the Western theory of Russian Formalism deal with the language of literature exhaustively. Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti and Russian formalism consider that a certain obliqueness or indirection or defamiliarization is the most distinguishing characteristic of the language of literature. Both theories point out this very aspect of language of... ⇨ Read more

Daniel Paul Schreber (1942-1911) starts to write Memories of my nervous illness in 1900 (during his stay at Sonnenstein Asylum) and he publishes it in 1902, before leaving the sanatorium. His personal account on schizophrenia is an essential reading for the clinical, psychoanalytic and psychological training, but the filter that will be adopted in this study will pertain to a different angle, concerning to a greater extent the formal considerations, the convention of classification – be it nosology or... ⇨ Read more

The question “to what degree does metafiction construct and deconstruct worlds” generates a conceptual and paradigmatic rethinking of metafiction, based on the theoretical tools of possible worlds theory, especially fictional worlds. More specifically, to what degree does metafiction succeed in constructing a verisimilar possible world or, on the contrary, undress it of materiality and illusion of reality, turning rather to itself as a text (metafiction is self-conscious, auto-referential fiction, drawing... ⇨ Read more

For the better part of the last three decades, Romanian poetry has undergone a series of mutations that led to the recovery of the interwar avant-garde, both in terms of poetic discursive strategies and in the militant rhetoric of its manifestoes. Although the first avant- garde influences date back to the 60ies, with a major iteration in the 70ies and the 80ies, because of the socio-cultural context of these periods we can only speak of a formal influence of the avant-garde. This paper intends to analyse how... ⇨ Read more

In the Hebrew language, notions such as the issue of temporality and a well- established sociocultural view have been conceptualised and internalised in a distinctive manner, making full use of the language‘s particularities. A cultural frame of reference with regards to Hebrew has not been the main focus of the linguistic community in several decades, with most recent studies typically centring instead on a psychological or morphological viewpoint, if not on the traditional topic of Biblical Hebrew itself.... ⇨ Read more